


don't let it get you down

by pencilledhearts



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23666857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pencilledhearts/pseuds/pencilledhearts
Summary: Dustin can't sleep and rings Steve for some answers about what went down that night in Starcourt Mall. Steve has been trying to do anything at all to not think about that night, but can't leave a friend in need.
Relationships: Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson
Comments: 9
Kudos: 69





	don't let it get you down

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to show a little bit of love for Steve and Dustin's friendship, especially after everything that happened in season three, and somehow this happened.
> 
> The title and lyrics are from 'Don't Let It Get You Down' by Johnnyswim.

> _Don't let it bring you down_
> 
> _It's only castles burning_
> 
> _Find someone who's turning_
> 
> _And you will come around_

The thing about Dustin is that he has far too much faith in Steve. The kid is smart – like, really smart – and yet he keeps coming back, keeps asking for advice, keeps asking for lifts, like he doesn’t realise that Steve is bad news.

Like sure, he’s been trying, he’s better than he used to be. He doesn’t laugh at people in the corridor anymore, doesn’t put people down just for being different, doesn’t crack jokes about people’s missing-possibly-dead younger brother, but that’s… that’s just a low fucking bar.

So he doesn’t get it, doesn’t know why Dustin calls him on the landline at one in the morning on a Tuesday night, doesn’t know why his voice is shaking or why he’s come to _him_ of all people.

“Steve?” Dustin asks quietly, far quieter than Steve’s ever heard him.

“Henderson, is that you?” he asks, mainly just to make sure he’s not dreaming. The can of beer that he’d been drinking is still clutched in his left hand but now that he’s got a kid on the phone, it suddenly seems wrong. He sets it down on the phone table.

“Yeah, can we- can we talk?”

“Um, of course, bud, what’s up?” Steve drags the phone over to the sofa and sits, resting his elbows on his thighs. “Do you know what time it is?”

There’s silence on the other end and whatever semblance of worry he’d been beginning to feel slaps him with full force, stomach churning.

“Is- has something happened? Dustin, I swear to god, if you shitbirds have adopted another demondog I’m gonna hit the roof _so_ hard-”

“It’s not that,” Dustin says quickly. His voice is quiet, muted. There’s a silence for a moment, then the sound of a deep breath. “What happened in the Russian base? After they took you?”

Steve heart jumps from its normal rhythm straight to on fucking edge at about the same speed that the Russian elevator had dropped.

“No,” he says, “Dustin, we’re not doing this-”

“I deserve to know!” Dustin hisses. “I was down there with you-”

“I’m not talking about what happened down there-”

“-I was one of the ones who left you behind-”

“-it’s in the past, alright, we’ve moved on-”

“-I just need to know-”

“it was two months ago, why the hell-”

“I can’t sleep, alright?!”

Steve runs a hand through his hair, leans back into the plush cushions and tries to breathe evenly. On the other end, Dustin swears quietly.

“I keep getting these nightmares,” he says. “Because I saw you before they took you and I saw you after and you were in the hospital for two days, Steve, and you’ve got to tell me because it’s got to be better than what I keep imagining.”

Steve presses the phone into the side of his head as hard as he can, the pain cutting through the muddle of thoughts that are going through his brain, his heart pounding even more at just the mere mention of what happened at Starcourt Mall.

He’s spent the last two months dodging calls from Nancy, side stepping questions from Robin, acting like his fucking life depending on it that he was normal for his parents.

“What about that guy,” he says, “Sam what’s-his-name, the guy Will was seeing. I thought you all had sessions with him, isn’t that supposed to help-”

“It’s not working,” Dustin says, his voice cracking. He sounds like Steve feels when he looks at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “There are too many variables, there are too many unknowns, I need the data so that I can - I need to know, alright?”

Steve’s heart is hitting his ribs so fast that it sounds like it’s happening right next to his ears, the sound reverberating around his head. His stomach is tight and the room looks slightly out of focus so he presses his nails into the palm of his hand, hard, welcoming the pain.

“It wasn’t good,” he says. “Dustin, what happened down there, I don’t like thinking about it, let alone talking about it.”

And this is why he’s the worst person for this conversation. A good person, a better person would know that Dustin is too young for this, would be able to put their own fears aside and be able to give a sensible answer, one that doesn’t have a fourteen year old listening to a guy four years his senior falling apart, would be able to separate themselves from their fucking emotions for just – one – minute but it’s him so he can’t.

Dustin lets out a shaky breath that crackles into Steve’s ear. He closes his eyes tightly and knuckles his forehead.

“Sure,” Dustin says. “Nevermind, I shouldn’t have called you. Bye, Steve.”

“Wait!”

Steve swallows, looks over to his abandoned beer on the side and only stops himself from grabbing by the thinnest thread of decency.

“They just questioned me,” he says. “I guess they thought I knew more than Robin, or maybe they were just sexist or something, cause they took me off to this room and then they kept asking me all this stuff about what I knew and who I worked for.”

Dustin stays silent. For a moment, Steve thinks he’s been disconnected, but then he hears a sniff.

“They didn’t like any of the answers I gave them, so they punched me around a bit, that’s all. I promise you, Dustin, there’s nothing to worry about. I just have shitty brain and too many concussions. The hospital was just precautionary.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s precautionary when you’ve had three concussions in eighteen months,” Dustin says, sounding the most like himself than he has so far.

“Whatever, dude.”

“They had you strapped to a chair,” Dustin says and Steve feels his heart jump again and honestly, if he hadn’t been having episodes like this so often lately, he’d already be on his way to the ER.

“They, like, didn’t want us escaping. That’s all.”

“He had a _bone saw_ , Steve.”

“But he didn’t use it!”

“Yeah, because me and Erica came in, what if I’d been two minutes later, Steve, huh?”

Steve doesn’t say anything, because he can’t, because he _knows_ that. There are nights when he can’t sleep, where he lies awake and the duvet feels like straps across his chest, where the mattress feels like steel. There are nights when he hears Robin’s screams in his sleep, hears Dustin sobbing. There are nights where Dustin doesn’t come in time and somehow, his dreams hurt worse than anything that actually happened.

“Steve?”

Sometimes, he can’t even fill in forms, of all things. He’d been filling in a job application with Robin and the questions – name, age, previous employer – all feel like demands that he can’t answer, and it doesn’t matter what he puts because they’re not going to believe it anyway.

_Scoops Ahoy, I work at Scoops Ahoy, do you think I wear this uniform for fun?_

Every time he takes Erica out for ice cream – because of course the fact that he no longer worked for an ice cream company doesn’t stop the fact that they made a deal – he can’t look at the menu because the word _butterscotch_ rings around his head with the image of round glasses and a manic smile.

“Steve? Earth to dumbass?”

“Fuck,” he breathes to himself and his own voice is shaky now, way worse than Dustin, and there are tears in his eyes and he needs to just hold it together, because Dustin is a kid, Dustin is the one who needs protecting, Dustin shouldn’t be looking after him.

“Have I said something, Jesus, Steve, are you there?”

“I’m fine, dipshit,” he says, even though his voice sounds far away.

“Is it your head? Are you having an episode? Should I call Joyce?”

“I’m _fine_.”

“You don’t sound fine, Steve.”

“Alright, I’m as fine as you are.” Steve shakes his head at himself because that’s not fair, that’s not mature. “Just… why does it matter? You’re safe, I’m safe, we made it out-” _apart from Hopper_ ¸ “-you saved my life, dude.”

Dustin groans. “It _matters_ ,” he says. “God, Steve, you matter, I care because I - I left you behind! If you hadn’t tried to save us then you never would have been trapped down there.”

“And if you’d never intercepted that Russian message then we never would have known about the lab, c’mon, Dustin, don’t do this to-”

“Yeah and maybe Hopper wouldn’t be dead and you wouldn’t have another concussion and I’d be able to sleep-”

“Is this a common thing?” Steve asks. “Like, does this happen often?”

“Not _often_ ,” Dustin backtracks. “Just, sometimes. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, you need to talk to someone, they can help.”

And, he’s not being a hypocrite. He’s not. It’s just that Nancy doesn’t understand because she wasn’t there and Robin’s fucked up in her own way anyway and he doesn’t want to put any more on her, and also he’ll be fine, he will, he just needs a bit more time.

“Why do you think I’m talking to you, dingus?”

Maybe he should put a stop to Robin hanging around with the kids if they’re gonna start picking up her insults. “I mean, like, a professional, that Sam guy.”

“Doctor Owens,” Dustin corrects. “He doesn’t _get_ it, and he didn’t help Will last year, he kept saying all of this psychology stuff and it was the mind flayer the whole time.”

“Not the whole time,” Steve says weakly, thinking about how pale and shrunken Will had been the whole of last year, the way he’d sought out company like he couldn’t bear to be alone.

“And I got some books out of the library and they all say you should talk to someone that you know and share how you’re feeling and that it’ll make you feel better.”

“Christ, fine, I get it,” Steve says. He pulls the phone close and twists so he’s laying down on the sofa, knees partially pulled to his chest, looking into the open, empty expanse of the living room. The letter he’d been reading earlier, the latest correspondence from his parents, is still lying on the table. “Why can’t you sleep?”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end. The Henderson’s only have one phone, on the wall in the kitchen, and so he tries to imagine what Dustin looks like right now. He’s probably sat on the floor, like the gremlin he is, door shut so that he doesn’t wake up his mom.

“I’m not lying, it’s only sometimes. I’m fine for a few days and I think it’s all good and then I get into bed and then _bam_ -“ Dustin makes an explosion nose into the receiver “-I’m back in the mall and it’s like I still don’t know where you are and my brain keeps making stuff up and if I just knew what happened, then I could stop imagining all this worse stuff.”

There’s a rustling noise, the sound of something being dragged and pages turning. “Did you know that there was this guy who was a prisoner of war and they water boarded him?”

“Jesus, did you get a book on this?” Steve asks, horrified. “ _Prisoner of war?_ I wasn’t a prisoner of war, Dustin.”

“You were a prisoner of an enemy state,” Dustin says. “They tortured you.”

“It was a few hours, maximum-“

“And there was another guy, they starved him for days at a time and they put him in this tank like what they did with El but for way longer-“

“They didn’t do that to me, Dustin.”

“And then they broke his fingers and they pulled off all his nails.”

Steve’s breath hitches and Dustin stops talking.

“Did they do that? Did they take off your nails?”

“No, dipshit, did you see any missing nails?” Steve asks harshly because he’s back in that chair, Robin’s hair tickling his back, yelling as the metal slides around his fingers, moments away from pain, worse pain than he’s already feeling.

“Shit, Steve, I’m sorry, I didn’t think that they tried, I didn’t…”

Dusting trails off and Steve counts to ten, takes one breath, two, then three. Bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds. It works, a little bit, brings him back to the presence, just like it always does.

“You need to stop researching this,” he says as firmly as he can. “None of that actually happened, and you’re just gonna – you’re gonna make yourself crazy going through all these different scenarios.”

“How do I stop?” Dustin asks quietly. “I close my eyes and I can’t help it.”

“D’you remember last year,” Steve says, “when we went to the tunnels?”

Dustin huffs a small laugh. “No, I forgot,” he says.

“Alright, dipshit, I can just hang up-

“No!”

“So listen, alright?” Steve waits a moment to see if Dustin will interrupt, then carries on. “I didn’t wake up until we were almost at the tunnels-”

“Well actually you were kinda conscious the whole way, it’s just that you don’t remember that bit-”

“Dustin!”

“Sorry.”

“I didn’t wake up until the tunnels and I just – sometimes I think about that, too. Like, what if Max had crashed the car? What if you went into the tunnels without me, who would have got Mike out from that vine? What if the others hadn’t distracted the demodogs right at that second?”

Steve runs his free hand through his hair. It’s trembling. Mercifully, Dustin is silent.

“I still think about it, sometimes, but I used to think about it a lot more. I couldn’t stop. It was like, after what had happened, normal life was just, nothing, y’know? And I kept thinking, Tommy’s complaining because Carol said something bitchy, but so what, that’s not, like, a real problem. The kids almost died last week. And then, on the days I didn’t pick you up from school, I couldn’t stop thinking, what if something’s happened, how do I know that they’re okay, what if they’ve found another monster to adopt, or a gates opened, or someone’s come after El and-“

He takes a deep breath because his words are running together and he’s talking too fast.

“I didn’t know that,” Dustin says quietly.

“Yeah, well.” Steve feels more moisture in his eyes. He doesn’t bother wiping it away, because there’s no one to see. “The point is, I couldn’t carry on like that, y’know, so I started running more, and like, distracting myself with other stuff, and I tried to rationalise it. Someone would call me if something happened, the odds of anything else happening to you kids is so low I shouldn’t worry. Actually, when you got me that radio, that made me feel better because I could _hear_ that you guys were okay.”

He doesn’t add that sometimes he’d sleep with it in his bed, listening to them make afternoon plans or talk about AV club, just because it comforted him. Or how sometimes, if he knew they were going to be in the woods, he’d go for a run just to make sure that there was nothing out there that shouldn’t be.

“Can I do that?”

“Do what?”

“Can I ring you?” Dustin asks. “Like, more. You said that hearing us helped… can I ring you, so I can hear that you’re okay?”

“Sure, kid,” he says, even though there’s a small voice that’s reminding him that sometimes he has the early shift at work and he needs all the sleep he can get, especially when he spends some nights like he’d been planning on tonight – staying up and drinking until he couldn’t physically keep his eyes open anymore. “Don’t hold back because it’s late or anything. If you get anxious, or weird, or you can’t sleep, you can ring me, any time.”

There’s a weird sound from the other end. It takes him a moment to realise it’s crying. Dustin is crying. Unexpectedly, it brings more tears to his own eyes. He scrubs away at them now, because he doesn’t understand why he’s crying just because _Dustin_ is.

“T-thanks, Steve.”

“Hey look,” he says, his voice sounding funny. “How about we have our own code, too, so if you’re, like, at school or whatever and you’re feeling crap, we can use the radios. We can use a different frequency so the others can’t hear.”

“Code Batman,” Dustin supplies instantly, “cause you’ve got a bat. And a Robin.”

“Sure, code Batman,” he agrees, hoping the way he’s rolling his eyes is somehow audible in his voice.

“What if you’re at work?” Dustin asks, suddenly sounding morose again.

“I work at family video, dipshit,” Steve says and Dustin snorts. “Plus, I work with Robin. She won’t mind.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

“Any time.” Steve wipes at his eyes again. “You’re like an annoying little brother, you’re a pain in the ass but you’re _my_ pain in the ass.”

“Did you just call me your brother?”

“I said that you’re _like_ an annoying brother, don’t make this into a thing-”

“You totally called me your brother-”

“-Robin already teases me enough, can you just, not-”

“You can’t take it back now!”

Steve smiles softly. It’s good to hear Dustin perking up a bit, sounding more like himself, less like Steve.

“I’m serious about that doctor, though,” he says. “Call me whenever but… I think despite everything, he did help Will. You should give him a chance.”

“I’ll think about it,” Dustin says. There’s the sound of something opening and closing on the other end, a little clanging. “Thanks, Steve,” he continues, the words distorted.

“Dude, are you eating a chocolate pudding?”

“Hey, I eat my feelings alright, don’t shame me.”

“I’m not _shaming_ you, I just thought we were having a moment,” Steve says.

“We are having a moment, just a moment with chocolate pudding. Jesus, Steve, I thought you were a loving and supportive older brother, not that you were gonna tear me down.”

“I’m not-” Steve shakes his head and cuts himself off. It’s not worth it. “Whatever, dipshit. You feeling better now?”

“Yeah,” Dustin says, swallowing pudding loudly. “Thanks Steve.”

“Alright. You should probably, like, go to sleep now. Haven’t you got school tomorrow? I swear, if I have to wake you up and you make me late for work-”

“Chill, Steve, relax,” Dustin says. “What’s gonna happen if you’re late for work? Robin will make you pay for her coffee? Take the comfy seat?”

“Hey, that seat has magic fucking powers, it has lumbar support,” Steve says. “And c’mon, you know how close Kyle is to firing me, how will you feel if you get me fired?”

“Maybe just watch some actual films and you’ll actually be a good employee,” Dustin says, sounding only slightly unsympathetic.

Steve groans. “They’re just so long and there’s always too much text or whatever-”

“It’s _Star Wars_ , Steve, c’mon, just sit through one-”

“Night, Dustin,” Steve says loudly because this is not a discussion he’s going to have again. He’s also definitely not going to tell the nerds that he couldn’t sleep last week and watched all three and that he actually kind of enjoyed them, even if he couldn’t read all of the text at the beginning because he’s still got some after effects from the Russians.

“Dude, you can’t just hang up on me when you want to win an argument-”

“Try me,” Steve says and almost puts the phone down then and there but hesitates at the last moment. “I’m serious, Dustin, any time, day or night.”

“Yeah, I got that the last three times you said it,” Dustin says but he sounds grateful. “Night.”

“Night.”

Steve sets the phone down on the receiver and takes a deep breath. He stretches out, his limbs slightly stiff from having been curled up for the last however long. He sits up.

It’s weird. At some point along the way, his heart has stopped racing. There’s still moisture on his cheeks, but it feels different to the nights where he crumples in his bathroom, hardly able to breathe from emotions. It feels - freeing almost.

Slowly, Steve stands up. He takes one last look at the letter on the table – he’s memorised every word, has read it at least ten times in a useless attempt to make himself closer to his parents – then turns away, picks up the half empty beer can from the phone table as he puts the phone back, and goes to the kitchen.

The sound the beer makes at it trickles down the drain is strangely satisfying.

The thing is, Dustin’s smart, far smarter the Steve will ever be, but at the end of the day he’s just a kid who wants a friend, someone who can understand but who will also tell him that everything will be alright. Dustin’s like him a little bit, the only one in his family who knows what went down, that there are monsters waiting to come through to their world at any moment in time, who doesn’t have someone he can turn to who’s right there.

But maybe, even if Steve is unequipped and one hundred percent not at all the right person to be comforting him, maybe that makes him exactly the right person, and maybe he _can_ understand why Dustin chose him of all people.

And maybe, in helping him, they can help each other.

Steve throws the empty can into the bin – a perfect shot, even from across the room, and heads to bed, drawing the covers up to his chin and only keeping one bedside lamp on instead of all five that he’s collected from other rooms of the house.

It’s the best night’s sleep he’s had in two years.


End file.
